Middlesbrough Performance Review

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Hello welcome to the next blog on this blog. If this is our first time here then please have a read of all the other blogs on here and let me know your thoughts anything I havent spotted or things you want looked at. Today we are going to look at the performances of the Middlesbrough first team throughout the season.

The data used for this I have used the rating each player gets on whoscored.com. Overall it was a season to forget for Middlesbrough. Ahead of the season the chairman had promised they would smash the league and £40 million spent in the transfer market seemed to suggest that could be possible. However they ended up 25 points behind winners Wolves and easily got knocked out by Aston Villa in the play off semi final. The idea here is to look at performances over the full season look at if you can see if the change of managers had an effect, did performances improve? Also which areas of the team generally performed well which areas didn’t which might provide insight where the team could be improved in the transfer market.

Above you can see box plots for each league game of the season including the play offs. Generally the team played better in the wins then defeats. Hows that for an earth shattering conclusion! What is interesting is the team had two managers during the season and it does look like under Tony Pulis the performances were more consistent, Lets look at this in more detail…..

Now lets look at performances under both managers. The density plot above shows there really wasn’t much difference. The players generally performed at the same level under both managers however Pulis seemed to be able to get more when it comes to ratings above 8.

25 different players started a game for the team this season with one player the clear outstanding performer. Adama Traore. However Traore also has the largest spread of performances showing he can be an inconsistent performer. Also it seems generally attacking players are more consistent performers. What will be disappointing is Ben Gibson seems to be overall the worst performing defender in the team. In midfield It looks pretty close between Adam Clayton and Jonny Howson for the best median perofrmances however clayton looks to be much more consistent.

Overall its interesting to review the the players performances over the season. It could be interesting to further stretch this to look at other teams or look at previous seasons for specific players. Also it could be further drilled down into home and away performances. Let me know your thoughts or if you have any questions really would like to hear from you.